


after all this

by Skylark



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Friendship, Gen, Jossed, Post-Canon, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25578328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skylark/pseuds/Skylark
Summary: You wake up in Texas after the end of the world.(Post-sburb. In a world where everything has reverted back to how it was before the game, Dave tries to be okay. He's not very good at it. Slowly, he gets there.)
Kudos: 23





	after all this

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first attempt at writing Homestuck and Dave Strider specifically; I wrote it in November 2012. I couldn't figure out how to end it, and then I lost the file for many years. Today I finally found it again, so I managed to finish it and now I'm posting it. Everything through "School's kind of a joke" is from 2012; everything after it is new.
> 
> This has obviously been jossed hard, but hopefully you find something to like in it anyway. Dave Strider was my first homestuck love, and he still means a lot to me.
> 
> Title from [After All This by Richard Jackson](https://likealark.dreamwidth.org/4103.html).

You wake up in Texas after the end of the world.

You’re lying on the ground of the park Bro used to bring you to when you were a kid and you’re staring at the clouds as they blow by, fluffy-white and serene. The playground is over the next hill, out of sight but within earshot, and you can hear kids screaming as they play. Dried grass scrapes at your cheeks, at the back of the hand that’s stretched out above your head, fingers flung out like you’re trying to grab hold of something. You’re practically staring straight at the noonday sun, and you squint despite your shades. It’s amazing that you’re not sunburned.

You sit up, slowly. Normal day, normal clothes, normal children’s laughter, normal bird calls, normal everything.

Except you.

\--

The first night you wake up from nightmares without a sound and stare at a ceiling you know but can't make out, sweat cold on the back of your neck, hands clenched so tightly into the bedsheet that your fingers hurt. You don't shake, you don't breathe too hard, you just lie there and wait it out. Wait it out. Close your eyes on darkness, a habitual if kind of futile gesture, and burrow into the quietest spot you can find in your head.

Your eyes fly open when you hear the ticking clock.

The next thing you know, you're out of your room and striding down the hallway towards the clock on the kitchen wall. You stare at it—it’s a cuckoo clock, ironic as everything else you and Bro own. In moments, it’s in your hands. 

The clock’s guts spill across the kitchen table, and your fingertips are soon coated in oil—a light brown sheen sinking into the spaces between your skin and fingernails. You hold a cog up to the light, and your eyes focus on the tiny signs of wear around the edges. Suddenly you know that the clock is twenty years old.

Bro is there when you turn around. You don’t have your shades on and he does, but it doesn’t feel like a handicap. You just look at him, your neck itching from dried sweat, your hair falling into your eyes more messily than usual.

Eventually, he nods, and you nod back, and he goes back to bed. That simple.

The clock is soon reduced to nothing but metal pieces, oil, and the plastic bird inside, googly eyed with a beak that looks more like a probocis. You gaze at the parts scattered across the tabletop and take in a deep breath, nice and slow so it doesn’t shake in your throat as you inhale. Then you put the clock back together through a mixture of logic and instinct. You try not to think about it, so you don’t. Instead, you blank your mind and watch your fingers tightening screws, realigning gears. It’s something you’re used to by now—doing things by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. 

The clock is dead silent when you finish. The hands are moving around the clock face, but you can’t hear the ticking at all. The cuckoo won’t come out of its shitty hiding space again.

But when you return to bed, you can still feel the rhythmic tick of your heart beating, and there’s not a lot you can do about that.

\--

The trolls are gone. You miss them: you think they might have understood, maybe.

You talk to the others but it’s half-hearted. The offhand remarks just don’t come as easily anymore: what you try to pass as irony is really just apathy. You tell yourself it’s that, but you don’t really have a name for what’s going down. You don’t think about it.

You grow quieter and quieter. Rose offers to listen but doesn’t press. Inversely, John offers to have an online feelings jam with you every time you sign on. Jade tries to distract you with chatter until finally, at three in the morning and at the edges of your patience, you type i got nothing to say i guess. After that, the bugging tapers off, but John sometimes still asks if you’re okay, like he can’t help himself.

John’s the one you stop responding to first. The wheel that squeaks, or something. Over time, the others stop messaging you, thinking you just need some space, and then you stop signing into pesterchum at all.

It’s a little after four in the afternoon when the school bus drops you off in front of your apartment. You shove the door open with your shoulder after undoing the twenty locks, your stomach singing an entire aria of hunger. You automatically reach out to slide your fingertips along the pitted surface of the long hallway as you walk towards the kitchen, looking for something to eat. Your house is empty and quiet, but Bro’s around somewhere, like always. His sudden appearances used to be surprising but now they’re just predictable, like clockwork.

You sit at the table, the tabletop covered in peeling linoleum that catches on your fingers as you drum a rhythm into the silence, and bite into a poorly made peanut butter sandwich. 

It’s quiet.

\--

School’s kind of a joke. You sit in the back of the class and doodle until you doze off, because you’ve stopped sleeping at night. You do the homework because you’re bored, not because it’s interesting, and make a game of toeing the bare minimum required to not get an F.

No one really talks to you, and that isn’t a huge change from before the game, but now you can’t help wondering if it’s because that’s the status quo or if it’s because they actually don’t remember you. You wander into first period thirteen minutes and 26 seconds late every day and put your head down on the desk and no one says anything, not even the teacher. It’s kind of comforting, being invisible. You don’t have to do anything for anyone that way.

You’re thinking about that when the girl who sits in front of you turns around. “So hey, uh,” she says, “why are you always late to class?”

“Oh my _God_ , Fiona,” her seatmate hisses at her, “you can’t just _ask_ people that.”

You blink at her, and then lick your lips to part them. It’s been so long since you last spoke that you have to clear your throat.

“I didn’t think anyone would notice,” you say, startled into honesty.

\--

Fiona’s nice, you guess. She’s normal and you don’t talk to her about anything, because she wouldn’t believe you and even if she did, you don’t want to fuck her up like that. It’s nobody’s business, anyway.

So you don’t talk about it. Instead she gives you her number and that turns into weird text messages at all hours about inane stuff. Homework, the weather. She sends you photos of her pet cat. It’s meaningless. It’s nice. 

She invites you to her house once and tries to teach you how to make fried gorditas from scratch. After that it becomes a thing, going over to her house after school, learning how to test if the oil in the pan is hot enough by tossing a few droplets of water in to sizzle, trying to cook something, maybe doing some homework after. You never go up to her room or anything, and you always leave at 7:52 PM—something that becomes a joke—but her family gets used to having you around. They try to feed you a lot and Fiona's grandmother won’t anyone turn off the TV or change the channel, so you get used to the low drone of Univision. You fall asleep on their couch pretty often, their cat sitting on the armrest next to you, with someone chilling nearby. It's easier to sleep there than anywhere else, and sometimes the exhaustion hits you all at once and you can't help it. They don't seem to think it's weird, though. They even offer to let you sleep in someone's bed if you want, but you don't want to push too far and besides, you like the company.

It’s on the way home after one of these times, the bus rattling and groaning as it bumps over the potholes in your shitty neighborhood, that you realize you have music in your head. It’s been silent in there for months.

You hum it a little, your voice a rough and hoarse thing. Emotion wells in your chest and you close your eyes to hold it in.

It’s weird, hearing the tick of the metronome through your headphones. You start with bass beats to cover it and then layer stuff on top, synthesizers, voice samples, mandolins. You spend the night working on it, and by morning you’ve got something interesting—not terrible, but not great.

You send it to Fiona’s e-mail. She texts you a bit later. _Where is that from?_

_i made it i guess_

_You made that? That was so good!!_

You stare at the message for a while. Before you might have droned on about music production, the choices you made, the stuff that didn’t make it in; now you don’t. You just say: _yeah?_

_Yeah, dude. It’s awesome._

_cool._

\--

You sign into pesterchum before school and send it to the others, and then log out before leaving for class. You’re usually on time these days. You think about it all day, your leg jittering beneath the desk, but you can't make yourself look at it that night either. The next morning, you log in again and you see a million message notifications and your breath freezes in your throat. 

You click on Jade, since she sent the least messages back.

GG: :o!!  
GG: this is really good!  
GG: are you okay?  


Dave rubs his knuckles against his eyes, thinking. He takes a deep breath and lets it out.

TG: yeah  
TG: i'm ok.  



End file.
